In this paper, a novel bipolar time-spread (TS) echo hiding based watermarking method is proposed for stereo audio signals, to overcome the low robustness problem in the traditional TS echo hiding method. At the embedding, echo signals with opposite polarities are added to both channels of the host audio signal. This improves the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme, since added watermarks have similar effects in both channels. Then decoding part is developed, in order to improve the robustness of the watermarking scheme against common attacks. Since these novel embedding and decoding methods utilize the advantage of two channels in stereo audio signals, it significantly reduces the interference of host signal at watermark extraction which is the main reason for error detection in the traditional TS echo hiding based watermarking under closed-loop attack. The effectiveness of the proposed watermarking scheme is theoretically analyzed and verified by simulations under common attacks. The proposed echo hiding method outperforms conventional TS echo hiding based watermarking when their perceptual qualities are similar.

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